After a verbose preamble, which among other things informs you helpfully that "behavior becomes unacceptable when it infringes on the rights of others," the Code of Conduct of the Public Library of the city where I live provides thirty-one examples of unacceptable conduct. These examples can be sorted into five general categories:

[...] How well does this theory apply to a typical piece of modern bureaucratic regulation? Or the types of behavior the library code prohibits, you might note that only those listed in the first category can be thought to convey useful information to any minimally socialized member of the community. There could be a real reason as to whether you're allowed to bring a bag of pretzels into the library, but do you really require "notice" that you can't snatch purses, expose yourself to patrons, do your laundry in the bathroom, or play high-stakes poker in the reference area? Suppose you hadn't been given notice of any of these things; does it follow you're free to claim as a defense insufficient publicity on the part of the state?

Can there be any non-psychotic person of minimally functional intelligence who would suppose that any of the things on this list, other than those dealt with in the most site-specific regulations, were not prohibited? [...] So here we seem to be faced with a wholly superfluous invocation of legal rules: rules that merely reflect tacit social understandings that themselves have no apparent need to be cast into a public legal text.

[...]

Posting a public notice of the unacceptability of theft, or of exhibitionism, or of physical and sexual abuse, is very much like passing yet another law providing still more penalties for the sale of already illegal drugs. Such actions represent our legal culture's equivalent to the practice of nailing garlic over doorways to repel vampires. In each case a psychological imperative born of a sense of lack of control, and of the fear and anxiety this sensation produces, demands of us that we "do something." Those same factors then lead us to do things that appear in the cold light of rational analysis to be almost wholly irrational.

Funny I read the other day a joke - it kinda illustrates what's talked about here:

Little Johnny is riding a bike to the street corner and he sees a cop riding a horse. The cop asks "Did Santa give you that bike?" and Johnny replies "Yes!" so the cop hands him over a ticket and says, "Here, next year, tell Santa to put lights on it!"

Johnny gets annoyed and asks "Did Santa give you that horse?" The cop plays along by telling him "Yes!" and Johnny tells him "Next year, tell him the d i c k goes under the horse, not on top of it!" and rides off on his bike.

Hahaha eli - you're so funny - I have read a slightly different version of the joke though - anyway!

I can also see 'WTP" has made an interesting post on the other closed thread. Here it is, along with the link.

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[...]

There are, however, other ways that similar types of defenses against the homosexual self-label can be articulated. These males to be "homophobic, gay-bashing hoodlums who pick up or are picked up by a gay male, have sex with him, and they exorcise their own homosexual guilt by assaulting and maybe killing him. The "exorcist syndrome" which is a version of the "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" nature manifested by people like Cardinal Spellman and Roy Cohn. The phenomena is also similar to a "split personality" situation. One of the personalities is "the grand inquisitor," as McCarthy and Cohn had become in a spectacular way, and it needs to punish the homosexual part of their 'personality'. This internal war is also projected outward causing these socially created monsters to harm other gay males by ruining their careers or, as other males will do, punishing them may include physical assaults and even murder.

[...]

Here's another parallel from poster maj:

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[...] The "grandiosity gap" - the painful and narcissistically injurious gap between their grandiose fantasies and their dreary and humiliating reality - becomes emotionally insupportable. They decompensate and act out. [...] Unbeknownst to them, they seek self punishment. They are at heart suicidal. [...] This is called "projective identification". They attribute evil and corruption to their enemies and foes. These forms of paranoia are called projection and splitting. These are all primitive, infantile, and often persecutory, defence mechanisms.

When coupled with narcissism - the inability to empathize, the exploitativeness, the sense of entitlement, the rages, the dehumanization and devaluation of others - this mindset yields abysmal contempt for the narcissist's victims. The overriding emotion of terrorists and serial killers, the amalgam and culmination of their tortured psyche - is deep seated disdain for everything human, the flip side of envy. It is cognitive dissonance gone amok. [...] To justify this apparent contradiction, the mass murderer casts himself as an altruistic savior of a group of people "endangered" by his foes. [...]

[...] Their cosmic significance is daily sustained by newspaper headlines, ever increasing bounties, admiring copycats, successful acts of blackmail, the strength and size of their opponents, and the devastation of human life and property. Appeasement works only to aggravate their drives and strengthen their appetites by emboldening them and by raising the threshold of excitation and "narcissistic supply". Terrorists and killers are addicted to this drug of being acknowledged and reflected. They derive their sense of existence, parasitically, from the reactions of their (often captive) audience.

Erich Fromm suggested that both Hitler and Stalin were narcissistic mass murderers. Hitler and Nazism are often portrayed as an apocalyptic and seismic break with European history. Yet the truth is that they were the culmination and reification of European history in the 19th century. Europe's annals of colonialism have prepared it for the range of phenomena associated with the Nazi regime - from industrial murder to racial theories, from slave labor to the forcible annexation of territory. [...] Moreover, Nazi Germany innovated by applying prevailing racial theories (usually reserved to non-whites) to the white race itself. It started with the Jews - a non-controversial proposition - but then expanded them to include "east European" whites, such as the Poles and the Russians. Germany was not alone in its malignant nationalism. [...] Nazism - and Fascism - were world ideologies, adopted enthusiastically in places as diverse as Iraq, Egypt, Norway, Latin America, and Britain. At the end of the 1930's, liberal capitalism, communism, and fascism (and its mutations) were locked in mortal battle of ideologies. [...]

[...]

What was the role of the Jews in all this? [...] The Jews constituted a perfect, easily identifiable, reification of all that was "wrong" with Europe. They were an old nation, they were eerily disembodied (without a territory), they were cosmopolitan, they were part of the establishment, they were "decadent", they were hated on religious and socio-economic grounds, they were different, they were narcissistic (felt and acted as morally superior), they were everywhere, they were defenseless, they were credulous, they were adaptable (and thus could be co-opted to collaborate in their own destruction). They were the perfect hated father figure and parricide was in fashion.

Delusional Disorder is indeed horrible - I remember some years ago when my neighbor, a twenty-nine-years old male, approached the authorities (the police) and asked them for protection; he told them his life was in danger because of a group of individuals who were following and harassing him on a daily basis for over a year or so. His wife told the police no actual threat had been made by anyone. He was functioning rather satisfactorily in work and his social relations and did not appear to have any other complaints. The police believed him initially and had several people watch him for a time period, only to discover that no one was, in actuality, following the guy. He was referred for psychiatric evaluation and found to suffer from delusional disorder.

Hello zanna - here it is an interesting post on paranoia (delusional disorders)

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[...]

A complex and pervasive issue for many paranoid people is the combination of sexual identity confusion, longings for same-sex closeness, and associated preoccupations with homosexuality. A connection between paranoia and homosexual preoccupations has been frequently noted by clinicians and has been confirmed by some empirical studies. Paranoid people, even the minority of them who have acted on homoerotic feelings, may regard the idea of same-sex attraction as upsetting to a degree that is scarcely imaginable to the non-paranoid. As the brief triumph of Nazism demonstrates, when paranoid trends are shared by a whole culture or subculture, the most horrific possibilities arise. The paranoid preoccupation with homosexuality has sometimes been explained as reflecting "unconscious homosexual impulses." This locution is misleading, in that it is not usually genital urges that stimulate homophobia; it is loneliness and the wish for a soulmate. Because as children we were comfortable with peers of the same sex before we became comfortable with opposite-sex peers, and because people of the same sex are more like us than people of the opposite sex, when we are withdrawn from everyone, we are attracted to someone of the same sex. Unfortunately, the patient becomes aware of this attraction, misinterprets it as homosexuality, and this sets off the defenses. In other words, at the core of the self-experience of paranoid poeple is a profound emotional isolation and need for a "consensual validation" from a "chum."

Lovdie - great that you've pointed us out to "boci"s post relating to the subject matter, but I am afraid s/he's putting it a bit mildly - the connection thing between the two, I mean - not sure where s/he's found the source/reference?

bhut_jolokia, as you even say, many white-collar guys (and gals like yourself) would show up in places where you'd not expect a lot of other white-collar people to be - however, I wanted to make an observation, which I think, is critical and unique to gay men specifically:[...]

We like to think this is America, the land of the milk and the honey, where people are not afraid to stand up for who they really are. That we can say what we want (remember the First Amendment?!), and choose our sexual partners in quantities and qualities that we see fit. But that's just not true - it's the inherent American hypocrisy type of thing that makes people think it's this way, when in actuality, it's that much different!

Excuse my level of detail now, but are you aware of the straight/married men's paranoia? The kind of unhealthy paranoia that white-collar "straight" guys entertain, because of the way the society they're part of, expects them to be and behave?! These "straight" men will NEVER, EVER have a photo online. They talk for hours online, needing to be convinced, only to NEVER show up to meet anyone in person. They will play e-mail games wherein they'll send 15 messages back and forth and mysteriously STOP responding the moment they're asked to put up or shut up (they choose "shut up"). "Straight" men make a big deal out of telling you about their wives and girlfriends and how they are able to "get away" with it, which is what they actually do not.

They try to make you understand that they seek only "discrete" encounters and feel it necessary to ramble on for a good 45 minutes feeling you out to see if you have hidden cameras in your house and if you are taking down their license plate number, being afraid that you might be able to find out their personal information and rush over to his house when he's at work and his wife is home raising the babies to tell her all about his secret "life."

You've got to love how these "straight" men orgasm in less than 60 seconds, the minute they LOOK at a penis in real life. That sure is HOT! You've got to love how straight men tell you they have "no experience" and have only "sucked one cock." You've to actually look at these men, who are not sure who or what they are, and who are lacking in any sort of self-confidence whatsoever, pretending to be one thing and actually being something else.

Not only that, mauchly, but str8 men are so scared of being outed that they will do totally stupid things when caught doing this kind of thing - the local paper reported some time ago that the police arrested a man who's approaching gay men cruising in public bathrooms asking them for money pretending to be undercover store's security staff - he had scored many many times, although he never ever showed a bagde to the gay men he conned!

I was reading the other day the girl (Julie, I believe) who's asking in what country are you living - in America, honey, in America - where stuff like this, e.g., happens all the time, to many more people you'd like to believe to!

Here it is an interesting post by "applewasp" along the same lines:

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Take Hitler: They say there is insufficient evidence that Hitler was an overt homosexual. But it seemed clear he had latent homosexual tendencies, and that he worried a lot about them. He was terribly concerned, for example, lest he give the impression of showing feminine traits - which, indeed, he did. A colleague of the himself-homosexual English diplomat and historian Sir Harold Nicolson, spoke of Hitler as being "the most profoundly feminine man that he had ever met, and that there were moments when he became almost effeminate."

Hitler also revealed fears of homosexuality by protesting so much that he had no feminine characteristics whatsoever. He was totally masculine - tough, hard, cold, ruthless, brutal. His tendency to think in terms of disjunctive stereotypes about men and women (strong, iron-willed, effective males vs. weak, emotional, incompetent female) is in itself revealing. Such thinking demonstrates a strong conflict and confusion between masculine and feminine natures. To him, sexual differences appeared as exaggerated and mutually exclusive opposites, as roles to be played, rather as natural attributes of human personality. In Hitler's case, as in Himmler's, the fantasized tough male role developed into sadism, murder and destruction.

The question of Hitler's latent homosexuality can also be approached indirectly. It can be stated with some confidence that Hitler must have had latent homosexual tendencies because he showed clear indications of paranoia. This does not mean that all homosexuals are paranoid, but it does mean that all paranoids have fears of homosexuality. The direct connection between homosexuality and paranoia was first noticed by Freud, who concluded that paranoia "invariably arises from an attempt to subdue an unduly powerful homosexual wish."

There is a terrifically strong need to deny homosexuality; the very thought of sexual contact with another man is "completely intolerable." Moreover, the need felt by a paranoid for approval is especially acute; his megalomania is in itself an expression of his need for proof that he is important. There is a high incidence of constipation in paranoid individuals. All paranoids have strong anal components, problems with order and cleanliness, and obsessions with purity and vice, as well as impurity and infections of others. Anal sadistic fantasies are directed towards the father, because he is seen as the rival for the mother's love; the intensity of the drive to be loved is supported mainly "by the intense need to neutralize and erotisize a tremendous hate." When the unconscious hate is so great, the attempt to erotisize it fails, and the individual turns to sadism.

While homosexual feeling and paranoid delusions may be in bitter conflict, both are, in a sense, dependent on each other and are defenses against one another. Thus, it seems quite possible that Hitler developed paranoid delusions, in part, to fight his homosexual feelings. As long as he persecuted and attacked homosexuals, he felt he was successfully combating his own inadmissible inclinations toward homosexuality.

Does the latter mean that, Hitler called, for instance, Jews homosexuals (allegedly undermining the manliness and and fighting spirit of the German people) in part to fight his unacceptable homosexual feelings? Or, that he judged so many other people as being inferior, lacking that perceived German "manliness" and "fighting spirit," as it was the case with Communists, liberals, gypsies, homosexuals, victims of warfare, etc?!

Distancing now a bit from the homosexual part of the equation, to fully address the paranoia one, we would have to add that when concocting the Jews conspiracy he mixed antisemitism and stereotypes of the Jews as Communists, as subversives and all kinds of other things - as a means to an end. Jews became a scapegoat for Germany's economic problems - enough to remind people of that conspiracy of "Jewish bankers" (Remember Fräulein Kost's line from "Cabaret," when asking, "If all the Jews are bankers, then how can they be Communists, too?")

A distinctive feature of Hitler's antisemitism was that it was formulated as conspiracy theory. For many, especially in Bavaria, this went hand in hand with the 'stab-in-the-back' theory, that is, with the view that Germany had not been defeated on the battlefield but had been brought down by liberal, socialist and Communist subversives on the home front. In other words, it was claimed that "the Jews had caused Germany's defeat in World War 1." Potentially, this made antisemitism explosive in Germany.

As we try to understand Holocaust, we'd have to also explain a bit the Darwinian biology of the time. There was a growing sense that there were those in society who were 'biologically' inferior and that for a 'fit' world to survive and thrive, those who were 'unfit' should be done away with. Instead of letting nature take its course, there was a unspoken sense that humans could take matters into their own hands. So when Hitler took power he started rounding all these people up. He used the Jews, Poles, gays, gypsies, Russians and mentally challenged people as slave labor and then started to annihilate them in gas chambers. He classed the above mentioned people as sub-human and basically in his Nazi world there was no place for the "sub-human", only the 'Aryans'.

I can also see 'WTP" has made an interesting post on the other closed thread. Here it is, along with the link.

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[...]

There are, however, other ways that similar types of defenses against the homosexual self-label can be articulated. These males to be "homophobic, gay-bashing hoodlums who pick up or are picked up by a gay male, have sex with him, and they exorcise their own homosexual guilt by assaulting and maybe killing him. The "exorcist syndrome" which is a version of the "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" nature manifested by people like Cardinal Spellman and Roy Cohn. The phenomena is also similar to a "split personality" situation. One of the personalities is "the grand inquisitor," as McCarthy and Cohn had become in a spectacular way, and it needs to punish the homosexual part of their 'personality'. This internal war is also projected outward causing these socially created monsters to harm other gay males by ruining their careers or, as other males will do, punishing them may include physical assaults and even murder.

[...]

Here's another parallel from poster maj:

Quote

[...] The "grandiosity gap" - the painful and narcissistically injurious gap between their grandiose fantasies and their dreary and humiliating reality - becomes emotionally insupportable. They decompensate and act out. [...] Unbeknownst to them, they seek self punishment. They are at heart suicidal. [...] This is called "projective identification". They attribute evil and corruption to their enemies and foes. These forms of paranoia are called projection and splitting. These are all primitive, infantile, and often persecutory, defence mechanisms.

When coupled with narcissism - the inability to empathize, the exploitativeness, the sense of entitlement, the rages, the dehumanization and devaluation of others - this mindset yields abysmal contempt for the narcissist's victims. The overriding emotion of terrorists and serial killers, the amalgam and culmination of their tortured psyche - is deep seated disdain for everything human, the flip side of envy. It is cognitive dissonance gone amok. [...] To justify this apparent contradiction, the mass murderer casts himself as an altruistic savior of a group of people "endangered" by his foes. [...]

[...] Their cosmic significance is daily sustained by newspaper headlines, ever increasing bounties, admiring copycats, successful acts of blackmail, the strength and size of their opponents, and the devastation of human life and property. Appeasement works only to aggravate their drives and strengthen their appetites by emboldening them and by raising the threshold of excitation and "narcissistic supply". Terrorists and killers are addicted to this drug of being acknowledged and reflected. They derive their sense of existence, parasitically, from the reactions of their (often captive) audience.

Erich Fromm suggested that both Hitler and Stalin were narcissistic mass murderers. Hitler and Nazism are often portrayed as an apocalyptic and seismic break with European history. Yet the truth is that they were the culmination and reification of European history in the 19th century. Europe's annals of colonialism have prepared it for the range of phenomena associated with the Nazi regime - from industrial murder to racial theories, from slave labor to the forcible annexation of territory. [...] Moreover, Nazi Germany innovated by applying prevailing racial theories (usually reserved to non-whites) to the white race itself. It started with the Jews - a non-controversial proposition - but then expanded them to include "east European" whites, such as the Poles and the Russians. Germany was not alone in its malignant nationalism. [...] Nazism - and Fascism - were world ideologies, adopted enthusiastically in places as diverse as Iraq, Egypt, Norway, Latin America, and Britain. At the end of the 1930's, liberal capitalism, communism, and fascism (and its mutations) were locked in mortal battle of ideologies. [...]

[...]

What was the role of the Jews in all this? [...] The Jews constituted a perfect, easily identifiable, reification of all that was "wrong" with Europe. They were an old nation, they were eerily disembodied (without a territory), they were cosmopolitan, they were part of the establishment, they were "decadent", they were hated on religious and socio-economic grounds, they were different, they were narcissistic (felt and acted as morally superior), they were everywhere, they were defenseless, they were credulous, they were adaptable (and thus could be co-opted to collaborate in their own destruction). They were the perfect hated father figure and parricide was in fashion.